EU nations ordered to take Iranian opposition off terror list
Europe’s governments were today ordered by a court to follow the UK’s lead and take Iran’s main opposition group off a blacklist of suspected terror organisations.
The European Court of First Instance in Luxembourg upheld a legal claim by the exiled People’s Mojahedin Organisation of Iran (PMOI) that there is no justification for including the group and freezing its funds.
The ruling is the latest in a series of verdicts supporting the PMOI’s demands to be removed from the list – but the battle is not over.
Today’s case was an appeal against a decision by the EU’s Council of Ministers last December to keep the PMOI on its terror list.
That decision came just weeks after the UK’s own independent judicial authority, the Proscribed Organisations Appeal Commission (POAC) ordered the PMOI’s removal from the UK list.
But the PMOI stayed on the UK list until June this year – and still remains on the EU list after a review in July.
The European judges said today last December’s EU decision should be annulled because there was no justification for including the PMOI. There was no evidence, added the judges, that the EU ministers had fulfilled their requirement to take account of the POAC ruling on the PMOI case, which had been the first by a “competent judicial authority” in the UK.
The PMOI was originally included on the EU list at UK insistence in 2002, after then Home Secretary Jack Straw put the PMOI on the Government’s own list.
Years of PMOI objections resulted in a European Court ruling in December 2006 that PMOI inclusion was “unlawful”. The Court said the group was seeking regime change in Teheran by political, non-violent means.
But EU governments – including the UK – took no action, claiming the ruling was based on a technicality.
Then last November came the POAC’s damning verdict. POAC chairman Sir Harry Ognall, a former judge, said the Government’s decision to blacklist the PMOI was “perverse” and “unreasonable”, because it had not been involved in any military activity since August 2001, and had disarmed in 2003.
Earlier this year, Europe’s human rights watchdog the Council of Europe joined in, publishing a report describing the POAC finding as “sensational” and “a real slap in the face” for the UK Government.
Cases such as the PMOI controversy were an example of the “disastrous” effects of such blacklists, said the report.
But the PMOI remained on the UK list and, in December last year, was also kept on the EU list when it was reviewed and updated.
It was only after a third legal victory for the PMOI – in the UK Court of Appeal in May – that the government conceded and took the PMOI off the UK list in June.
However, in July, the EU Council of Ministers updated the EU list again and kept the PMOI on it, citing “new information (that) warrants the group’s inclusion on the list.”
A PMOI appeal against that latest refusal to remove the organisation is still pending.
Meanwhile, today’s ruling reminded EU governments that “inclusion in that list must be made on the basis of precise information or material in the file which indicates that a decision has been taken by a competent national authority, in principle judicial, in respect of the persons and entities referred to.
“The names of persons and entities included in the list must be reviewed at regular intervals, at least once every six months, to be certain that there are grounds for their continued inclusion in the list.”
The PMOI was founded in 1965 with the aim of replacing the government of the Shah of Iran, and then the rule of the mullahs, with a democracy. It once had an armed branch operating in Iran and insists it has renounced all military activity since mid-2001.
